Whew! I’m exhausted. Granted I was nothing more than online all day, but still! Seemed busy. I greatly enjoyed being surrounded (virtually) by Shakespeare stuff all day. Kept wanting to say that I celebrate Shakespeare Day like an Irishman celebrates St. Patrick’s Day but there wasn’t nearly enough alcohol to back that up. As promised I broke my last year’s record (which turns out to only have been 9 posts in a day) with, well, this will be the *11th* post on Shakespeare Geek today! My RSS people must be getting sick of me! And I’m very happy to have a tolerant boss at the day job, because about half of those bad boys were queued up and ready to launch throughout the day but a bunch of them I whipped up on the fly as stories came in that caught my eye. Meanwhile I put out 27 Twitter posts. Traffic was flying all over the place, thanks to all the “mentions” and “retweets” that came along with that. Picked up a whole bunch of new followers! Thanks everybody for the boost! Day’s not over so I won’t have my real traffic numbers until tomorrow, but I can already see that today’s been my second most popular day ever, beating out the “discovery” of Cardenio back in March. What was my most popular day ever? It was the day I titled a post “Shakespeare as Bob Dylan”. That one post got onto a Dylan fan board and hoooboy did traffic spike! They didn’t stick around, really, since that post didn’t have much meat in it. But man, he draws a crowd. The discovery of Cardenio hit maybe 2/3rds the Dylan traffic got. Ok, I’m about Shakespeare’d out for the day (ok, who am I kidding, if the wife falls asleep I’m gonna bang out two or three more posts and maybe a movie review before midnight..) Take care, geeks! Happy Shakespeare Day, and THANK YOU SHAKESPEARE!
Best (?) Movies Inspired by Shakespeare
Ok, I saw this list earlier this morning and quite frankly didn’t love it, but it’s going around like crazy on Twitter so maybe I’m in the minority.
These films are not adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays – that would be a completely
different list – but rather stories that showcase the inspirational
power of Shakespeare’s work. It’s a list that is eclectic, with
something for everyone, so get some WIll power and check out one of
these DVDs this weekend!
They’re certainly right that a list including the Hobart Shakespeareans, Shakespeare in Love and Shakespeare Behind Bars is “eclectic”. I think that was my problem with it, I’m not really sure that a list with no meaningful theme (other than, apparently, having the word Shakespeare in the name? :)) does any good for anybody. At the very least it should have more than 5 items on it.
Compare that list to the one over at The Stir which seems more consistent. They call it “movies you might not know where based on Shakespeare”, and it swings from She’s the Man and 10 Things to Lion King and West Side Story. But at least I can point at that list and say “Ok, I see what you were going for there.”
Geeky Ways to Celebrate Shakespeare Day
http://www.geekosystem.com/shakespeare-birthday-celebrate-geeky/
Starting off such a list with “Go watch Star Trek for the Shakespeare references” qualifies what kind of geeky they’re talking about :). Done it. Read Neil Gaiman? Done that, too. Two out of the five, though, are new to me, so I have to go do them 🙂
Shakespeare in Advertising? Love it. Sometimes. Not often.
I saw this article from AdLand about Shakespeare’s influence in advertising and thought I’d see some examples of the occasional “Wherefore art thou?” reference stuck into a commercial. Imagine my surprise when the first one in the list, for 501 jeans, was a verbatim enactment of the Bottom’s transformation from Midsummer Night’s Dream!
There are more than a dozen video clips, and I have not watched them all. Some are very old, some I’ve seen. I think the embedded one above might well be the best, simply out of its respect for the text. But go check them out for yourself, there’s plenty to pick from. Shakespeare in the Park, trying to teach Hamlet to the squirrels, was sort of cute in a bad pun sort of way.
Got Kids? Got a Computer?
My kids, at 7 5 and 3, spend their fair share of time on the computer. Mostly that involves the 7yr old doing all the work while the other two watch and kibitz. Despite all my best efforts, their time is always spent on Sprout Online or PBS Kids or Go Girls Games, all of which seem to fit the same general pattern of Flash games – some puzzles, some coloring, some printable stuff. Always on a different theme.
So why not a Shakespeare theme? Especially today, of all days. The Folger’s got just such a page ready to go, which I’ve sent to my kids already. The coloring on theirs might be a little too advanced for my little ones, but they are very good at jigsaw puzzle (it’s the favorite game on my iPhone), and I’m happy to see “maze” in there. I think that one, while being the least Shakespearean, also probably takes the most brainpower.